The Sinclair QL Forum

Thanks Dilwyn for the information, I'm going to add a note to the article that includes this precaution and I'm going to do some testing.

Fortunately, we are seeing how some new games for QL include a Spanish version, but this language has some peculiarities, and punctuation marks such as accents and opening marks for exclamations and questions. With the bash program for Linux called utf2ql.sh it is possible to convert a UTF-8 text wr...

Hi, I tried adding unumbered line with MRUN to a numbered programme. BUt on QPC2, Q68, SMSQmulator, the sysem is going so fast the SBASIC is loaded and no counter can be seen, only a flash of the status loading bar. This gives a new meaning to the definition of "shadow loading" for cases ...

bwinkel67 wrote: ↑Wed May 15, 2024 12:18 pm I added a twirling clock to minesweeper program and it works really well:

Great!

As the QL does not know the number of lines in the listing until it is fully loaded using a similar mechanism could not be programmed too easily. However, a ROM routine could be incorporated within the LOAD routine to calculate the % loaded based on the byte size of the program / bytes loaded. The ...

I was looking for a name to refer to this method, and today, in the Spanish forum they proposed "shadow loading". If you can think of another possibility, I would like to know about it.

Derek_Stewart wrote: ↑Wed May 15, 2024 7:14 am Hi

Great idea, just need this added to part of the QL ROM, or assembler extension.

so that no extra programming lines have to be added.

Are you talking about implementing a routine in the system that shows, by default, a load percentage for the programs?

How would it be?

That is indeed a very interesting finding - I had not realised that lines without line numbers are executed as soon as the loading process reaches that line. The discussion on the Spanish forums is well worth a read and the uploaded video shows it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppv3Ued5...

I suppose it depends on not adding too many "progress" lines in between lines of SuperBASIC so as not to have too much effect on loading times. Correct. It is "useful" for programs with many lines, where the loading time is long, or, for example, when reading _bas files from a m...

This meeting is going to be exciting, and seems full of news. Enjoy a lot! And document it